"CREDENZA" PAUL ROUPHAIL: Paris

Stems Gallery is pleased to present Credenza, an exhibition of new paintings by Paul Rouphail for his third solo- presentation with the gallery.

Credenza, an 18th-century Italian word meaning “belief” refers to the room or sideboard table in a wealthy home in which servants were made to sample prepared food for evidence of poison prior to serving it to their noble patrons. Rouphail’s paintings make reference to the double meaning of the word as both a design object now common in middle-class homes and as a testament to faith and fidelity.

Credenzas appears in four of the artist’s largest oil paintings. Two of such works depict a modest interior with a framed reproduction of Rembrandt’s Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem. The Dutch artist’s 17th century painting foregrounds a forlorn Jeremiah ensconced in a cave grieving the destruction of the biblical city, which burns in the background. Rouphail’s paintings situate Jeremiah centrally above the depicted credenza, transforming the table, and its contents–a black ceramic basin, a glass of water, a vase with wilting flowers– into an altar to the crestfallen prophet. In Room in the Outskirts, the artist extends our point of view further with an open window through which we discover a deserted urban scene in a nondescript small town. Similarly, Rouphail’s Coffee is understood as both a quotation of Philip Guston’s painting Kettle (1978), and as a personification of Jeremiah’s lament.

In Credenza (After Carvaggio) and Credenza with Flowers  the same sideboard table is accompanied by a reproduction of Carvaggio’s The Incredulity of St. Thomas. In the latter of Rouphail’s paintings a vase of flowers is vibrantly cast in sharp slanted light as if in a noir film, while the former, more subdued painting replaces the bouquet for a sex toy. 

Themes of sex and virility appear in the smaller gouache paintings on paper, all of which Rouphail completed during a month-long residency at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy in 2023. In Hunter a small figurine with bow and arrow poses on a metallic shelf below a large brass fallace. In Man the artist reproduces a maquette fountain by artist Gianni Politi of a figure alone, reclining with his head twisted and mouth agape, masturbating.

By introducing new objects to familiar settings from the artists’ previous exhibitions, Credenza sets the subjects of faith, fear and indulgence to brooding, atmospheric scenes of interiors and small landscapes. The paintings’ melancholic tone illustrate a distinctly 21st-century unease concerning the intersection of climate catastrophe, political upheaval and social isolation. Like faith, the medium of painting affords us a distance of removal by directing our gaze at truths that are difficult to comprehend — such as mistaking self-absorption for contemplation or hopelessness for doubt.

-- Paul Rouphail